My Diaper Mentor

Once again, this post is part of the Cloth Diaper Carnival, hosted by Dirty Diaper Laundry.


In my high school, all students had to take a personal finance class. For the most part, the class was pretty ridiculous, trying to "teach" concepts that are either common sense, or vary greatly family to family. One of the more useful projects we were assigned was to make a family budget, after randomly drawing a job and salary. The budget was to be based on a variety of lifestyle choices, including type of home, car, food choices, and diapers. One choice that I remember was my partner and I deciding to use a combination of cloth and disposable diapers, thinking that it would be too difficult to use cloth all the time but that we could save money by using cloth.

I probably didn't think about diapers decisions again until a little less than two years ago, when I went to a baby shower for my friend, Wendy, who was planning to exclusively cloth diaper her first baby. Her friend passed on a brand of diapers that she wanted to the guests, and listed where you could order them online. This was the first time that I was introduced to the "new" all-in-one and pocket-style cloth diapers. They look much like disposables, but with nice colored fabric, and function just as easily in terms of putting them on and taking them off of the baby. I thought they were pretty cool, and was interested to see that there were more options to the diapering choice than I had been aware of.

Months later, that same friend came to stay with us for a few days, with her husband and new baby. They cloth diapered while traveling, and used our washer to do a load of diapers. She had a cute wooden basket that the diapers were neatly folded in, a cute hand-made diaper bag, and cute wet bags too. Wow, I thought, who knew that diapers and their accessories could be so... cute!! I also saw how entirely do-able it was to travel with cloth. From then on, I knew that I would use cloth diapers with our baby and it became one of the things that I looked forward to about having a baby, too.

So thank you, Wendy, for being the first to show me the light and expose me to cloth diapers for our generation. I talked to Wendy about this post and she says she knows at least 10 people who have started using cloth diapers since she began -- what an inspiration!

Folding diapers in our laundry room during a visit this summer.

Hoping No One Saw Me

Sweet Pea is in the midst of a possible Nap Schedule Transition, AND her First Illness (a cold). After three attempts at laying her down to sleep for a nap today, I finally gave up when it got WAY past her normal time for a first nap and got her to fall asleep in the ERGO. So, I had been sitting and reading blogs while she slept and occasionally snored. She had been resting for a while, when I noticed the time. I knew the mail-person would be coming soon and there was a bill that I needed to mail today, so I decided to slip on some warmer clothes and walk the block to the mailbox with Sweet Pea in the carrier. The clothes that I could find that I could add to my outfit without disturbing her were: my husband's black fleece vest, a large green knitted blanket, my heeled clogs, and a red baseball cap. This was over a pair of jeans, rolled up at the cuff, and a bright pink t-shirt. I tucked the blanket around myself and Sweet Pea and into the ERGO to keep her arms and bare feet warm. I was about halfway back down our block (in the rain) when Sweet Pea stirred, and I looked down and realized the blanket had fallen and was hanging from only my waist now, looking like a ridiculous skirt. I don't know how long it was like that, and even when it was properly positioned I'm pretty sure I looked like a crazy person with a giant growth on my front. I'm just glad no one else was at the mailbox at the same time.